A Conjuring of Assassins, page 28
“Marks we can take up as we retreat?” said Placidio.
Neri grinned. “Certain.”
Back on his feet, Neri brushed his drawing away with his boot. “I’d tell you the rest, but you have to come with me now. I know time’s short, so’s I’m not going to babble about things Dumond says you need to see for yourself. You’ll not believe what we found in the tunnels. Once you’re through the Quartiere gates, head straight through to the Cat’s Eyes at the cliff top. I’ll meet you there.”
Leaving no opportunity for discussion, he sprinted away. Just as well. We had no letter of introduction to get Neri through the Quartiere di Fiori gate, so he had to get to our meeting place by another route.
Placidio and I made sure the lane was clear of Pizottis and got ourselves admitted to the Quartiere di Fiori. As we hurried through the tree-shaded lanes of the Flower Quarter on our way to meet Neri, I told him the story my brother’s excitements had precluded. My father would have named it The Wool Commissioner and the Murder in Cuarona.
Placidio listened carefully. “So you first thought Egerik had murdered his wife in one of these exquisite pageants, but now you say he actually fancied her and dispatched that half-naked servant to murder the one who attacked her. Certain, I don’t see how it could be both.”
“I can’t say for certain that he loved her,” I said. “But Lenore is a good observer, and Nuccio’s message tells us that Egerik didn’t kill her for the Brotherhood, at least. No servant of Egerik’s would slaughter Oriana’s attacker on his own. So maybe Egerik set him to it because the attacker dared touch his prized possession or harmed the perfection of her beauty. But together the two stories reinforce what we saw in the house. Lenore said the attacker’s body was ravaged like a wild animal had done it; you said Cei reminded you of a wolf tamed to the leash.”
“He does that.”
“After I left Lenore, I was trying to understand why Egerik kept Cei around after the murder, even while his wife was living. And I told myself that Egerik is clever and determined and does nothing without a reason. If he set someone to take his vengeance, then it was done exactly as he wished. Savagely.”
Saying the words aloud helped me make sense of it all. “Five years ago, Cei would have been younger than Neri. How long had Egerik been grooming him to do such things? Has he killed others who crossed Egerik? You see where all this goes?”
“Aye.” Placidio paused and tapped the walking stick on the rocky ground. “Egerik has a trained assassin in his collection. Pretty. Barefoot. Most people wouldn’t suspect him.”
“An exquisite assassin.”
The cypresses and poplars thinned as we neared the rocky eastern boundary of the Heights. There, the ring wall was actually under our feet—a broad expanse of naked stone, riddled with cracks and littered with rocks and rubble, the top of a stomach-churning cliff. A glance down from the edge—only children or the nerveless ever tried that—revealed the sheer rock face that provided a much stouter defense from an eastern assault than anything humans could build. One might have thought Mother Gione herself had taken her longsword and cleaved the rounded edge from the hilltop to expose the solid underpinnings of Cantagna.
“So is fish man off searching for his mother’s servant?” Placidio said, as we paused behind a straggling clump of junipers and scanned the expanse of rock for Pizottis.
“He told me he got work packing pilchards for Frenetti, and is to sleep in the fish house. Then he left as abruptly as you did. I had to turn my mind to Chimera business. If we don’t get our hands on the Assassins List today, I’m afraid we never will.”
I wanted to talk more about Teo. To ask Placidio why he had changed his mind about him so abruptly. Why he’d shown him respect. But across the rocky flat a wiry figure sat waiting atop a half of a lightning-split boulder near the cliff edge. It was time to work.
23
THE DAY OF THE PRISONER TRANSFER
LATE MORNING
Travelers crossing the rolling fields and vineyards to the east had named Neri’s perch and its twin the Cat’s Eyes. In the early morning, sunbeams reflected from polished swirls of color in the oddly shaped pair of rocks, giving rise to the story of a great cat that lounged atop Cantagna’s heart gazing out on the fruits of her prosperity.
My brother scrambled down and beckoned us follow him into a crack in the cliff. Millennia of rain, wind, and earthquakes had widened the crack into a rugged defile. I held my breath and stepped carefully down the narrow, gravelly, and much-too-steep-for-comfort path. Placidio followed close behind. I wished him steady feet; if he slipped, he’d send me shooting out over the edge and tumbling all the way down to the city’s East Gate.
“Sorry the ground’s a bit shifty,” said Neri. “I explored this years ago. Thought myself an adventurer when I found three caves. Two were no more than scrapes in the wall; but one went deeper than I could go without a light. When Dumond and I were hunting an entrance to the tunnels, I remembered what you said, swordmaster, about the caves down to the Asylum Ring, and I wondered if this one might be connected. The map seemed to agree.”
Pebbles squirted out from under our shoes, skittering and pelting down and down and down until I couldn’t hear them anymore. Fortunately it was only a short distance until Neri vanished into a hole in the left wall. I stepped in after him, never so grateful to be surrounded by rock and dirt on every side and Placidio behind.
Neri quickly disappeared farther into the dark. My eyes blinked rapidly, dazzled from the brilliant morning.
“Left this here before I came to fetch you.” Neri returned into view with a lantern. “Come.”
The cave led downward through a tunnel of rock. Neri’s light seemed much too pale, but once we had turned a corner where the outside glare couldn’t reach us, my eyes attuned to the lamplight. The way was wide enough we could walk two abreast.
The rock soon yielded to a mix of rock and dirt. Sturdy beams had been placed long ago in places where rock had crumbled or dirt slumped.
Neri halted where the tunnel branched at a particularly large heap of stone slabs, dirt, rock, and splintered wood. One route continued past the debris pile in roughly the same direction. The other headed over the pile and into another tunnel.
Neri pointed straight past the mound. “This route we’re on takes us straight to Dumond’s trapdoor from Egerik’s kitchen yard. But that entry we just came in won’t do you for escaping, as it would send you right back past the palazzo to the guards at the Quartiere gate. So you’d need to turn into this side tunnel. Follow our marks and eventually you’ll get to Dumond’s new door that will take you out of the Heights and into the Street of the Coffinmakers.”
“We’d climb over this heap?” Placidio pointed his walking stick at the mound. “Assuming we’ve found our way this far.”
“Aye. It’s not so rough. We’ve a lantern hung beneath the trapdoor and torches set along the way, ready to fire as you need. Believe me, you don’t want to stumble wrong in these tunnels.”
Neri held the lantern up high enough to show us an unburnt torch sitting in a bracket.
“Stacks of these torches were already here,” said Neri. “Old as the moon, but sitting in nice puddles of pitch. Dumond was able to unstick them. He’s getting good with fire and heat.”
“Left from the plague burials,” I said. Neri’s lantern had revealed a massive lintel stone above our heads. It was carved with the ancient words seen at the entry to every graveyard: Riposa nella Notte Eterna. Rest in the Night Eternal.
More telling, the carvers had left off the traditional ending of the graveyard greeting: fino al ritorno degli Dei Invisibili. Until the Unseeable Gods return. Over half of Cantagna’s population had died during the three waves of plague. No one believed the gods would ever come back.
“There’s corpses in every direction,” said Neri. “For now we’ll go straight toward the palazzo.”
I covered mouth and nose with my mantle as we squeezed past the mound and entered the first burial chamber. The walls were lined floor to ceiling with niches, each holding a desiccated corpse or two or five, wrapped in crumbling canvas. The dry cave air so far above the river, and the distance of a hundred fifty years, made it possible to pass through without vomiting. The odor was mostly dust and mould. Some places you could see a name scratched in the wood—Rigo, Gulio, Maréa, three children …
Many of the shelves had collapsed. Burial parties had scraped out side rooms in the packed earth walls. Weak, exhausted, numb as the years of horror passed, they had dumped cartloads of victims there without wrapping or identification.
Through chamber after grim chamber, we splayed our fingers in a sign of Mother Gione’s peace, as the weight of mortal sadness settled on our shoulders.
“Not much farther,” said Neri softly.
The walls of packed earth pressed closer. Placidio’s hat brushed the ceiling. The dark devoured our lantern light. Mercifully, the burial parties had not pushed into such close quarters.
“Here.” Neri pointed out the location of Dumond’s trapdoor, marked with carefully placed scratches on a well-shored section of tunnel roof. “After you’ve gone in, Dumond will fire it with his magic. Get out to the garden, yank the ring to open it, and you can drop right down here.”
Past the trap, the tunnel ended abruptly in a solid slab.
Nonetheless, Neri beckoned us onward. A very narrow vertical crack seamed the end wall.
“Through this?” Placidio was skeptical.
“Worth the trouble,” Neri whispered. “You need to see.”
To get through the crack, Placidio had to remove his wide-brimmed hat and the fashionable padding Vashti had installed in his yellow doublet and trousses. I had to wrap mantle, gown, and underskirts around me so tightly, I felt like a sausage.
Even before Neri brought the lantern through, I knew we were in a huge space. But the light revealed its immensity. The stone roof was supported by sturdy pillars and beams. Free of the miasma of death, it had been swept, mostly de-spidered, and filled …
Neri held up the lamp.
“By the Mother!”
Sacks of oats, flour, barley filled one corner. Stacked casks of ale, wine, and mead lined the walls. Everywhere stood wax-sealed jars bearing the marketplace symbols for dried fish, dried meat, and dried fruit, dry noodles and beans. More sealed jars held nuts and seeds and ever-precious olive oil. A hoard of salt would be the envy of any village in the Costa Drago. These were stores enough for a siege.
“We thought this a bit more than expected for one man and his household,” Neri whispered. “And then there’s this…”
His knife blade made quick work of the lock on a gate of rust-free iron bars, and he waved us through. The walls were festooned with weapons. Pikes, halberds, staves and spears, shields and bucklers. Dozens and dozens of them. Some new, some well used, but clean of rust. Long racks held more of them. Sampling the contents of the long wood chests stacked three high revealed bows and thousands of arrows.
“Atladu’s balls, does he have an army hid down here, too?” said Placidio, peering into the corners the lamplight couldn’t reach.
“If so, we didn’t find it,” said Neri. I recognized the very particular grin he was trying to hide—the pleasurable satisfaction of truly astounding a taskmaster.
But this was no game.
Placidio inspected the wall of polearms, examining joints and blades. “Not exceptional work, but, damnation, between this room and the stores, they’ve spent a grand duc’s ransom. There’s no city regulations forbid a man, even a Mercediaran, from stocking his cellars. But the Shadow Lord might want to send scouts out to places like the Boars Teeth or the Spikes, where troublemakers could hide thinking to use all this. ’Twould be a clever maneuver for Vizio to send a lightly armed band as her vanguard.”
“He scouts those places regularly,” I said. “And he has spies—” I stopped. There were things I should not speak, even to those closest to me.
Sandro had two people deeply entrenched in Protector Vizio’s house who kept him apprised of every development. And it was only nineteen days ago that he had proposed this scheme to prevent the Assassins List from breaking the ever fragile peace between Cantagna and Mercediare.
“He would know if Vizio was on the move.” Unless, of course, those brave spies had been caught and silenced.
Placidio ran a finger along a poleax blade. Rubbed it with another finger and sniffed at it. “These have been sharpened and oiled quite recently, lady scribe. Something’s in the wind.”
“This changes everything,” I said, shaken to the marrow. “This is much bigger than offer the Assassins List to Vizio to win my freedom or blackmail the ambassador to let me go free.”
“Aye. We’re well beyond that.” Placidio’s sobriety reflected my own. “For a diplomat fairly new to Cantagna to accumulate such a hoard without the Shadow Lord learning of it, he would need expert help. Who better than Cinque the Spy? And Egerik is wily enough that he would never leave himself exposed to anyone he didn’t trust. To my mind we’ve just answered our original question: Cinque is not afraid of the ambassador because they are partners. Makes me wonder if Cinque got himself caught apurpose to bring them together. Today.”
“Two days ago I’d have called that madness,” I said. “Now I wonder if the Assassins List plays a role in their conspiracy at all or if we’ll have to kidnap Rossi to find it.”
Placidio opened a deep chest to reveal helms, habergeons, and other simple armor. “Rossi promised you that Vizio would not see the List. Do you truly believe that?”
That took some thinking, riffling through our meetings over the years, and every word of our interview in the Palazzo Segnori.
“I do,” I said at last. “Rossi never cheats. He plays to win and would consider it demeaning. This game happens to be much bigger than I knew at the time, but he meant it.”
“Which suggests that he and Egerik are not working for Vizio, but aiming at her.”
Puzzle pieces shifted into place.
“Supporting rebels,” I said. “We’re awfully far away, but then, barges head south from here every day. Safer to accumulate arms up here. The Shadow Lord is not going to be at all happy to discover this city will appear to be supplying rebels as well as assassins. Rebellions fail and Vizio would see everyone in Cantagna as her enemy. And certain”—how had I overlooked the obvious?—“they could use the Assassins List, not for vengeance or a bargaining chip, but for exactly its purpose. Call in the pledges and hire an assassin to remove Vizio.”
“Aye, they’ll send Vizio a cloth-of-gold sash to celebrate her decade in power in the hands of a well-paid assassin, backed up by a well-armed, well-fed cadre of rebels.”
“An exquisite assassin,” I said, near breathless with the audacity of such a plot. “Perfectly groomed for this task.”
“That plays. Whatever the variant details, I’ll wager my fine hat that the Assassins List will be inside Palazzo Ignazio today.”
“Indeed. Rossi would never let such a valuable instrument out of his control before ready to use it. If we can get a notion of where it is, a location we can describe to Neri, we can have it. I have to become Monette, so you’re the one will have to watch, listen, and feed the information to Neri.”
Placidio bowed. “Baldassar is a man of opportunity.”
“I’ll be waiting,” said Neri. “But we need to move on. Can’t hear the bells down here.”
“Yes, of course.” I released a long breath. Failure had just taken on a much more terrible face. “Are there any more terrifying mysteries you want us to see, little brother?”
“Just another burial chamber up closer to the house,” Neri said. “Recent. Not old. We think it likely his wife’s. The place is fancied up, the walls painted like the Palazzo Segnori—”
“Artwork, you mean,” I said. “Murals.”
“Aye, and a marble coffin with a lady’s figure carved on it and gold-work posts at the four corners.”
“I want to see it before we go. I need something to drive a wedge between Rossi and Egerik.”
“Boy was right. We’d best hurry,” said Placidio. “Be late and all will be for naught.”
Oriana di Sinterolla’s resting place was just off a side passage beyond the storage cavern. No expense had been spared in its elaboration. The four gold pillars at the corners of the tomb, shaped like bundled spikes of sweet asphodel, matched the finest work of Ranila di Baggio, il Padroné’s choice to cast his beloved grandfather’s memorial statue.
The luminous murals were surely the work of young Tiso di Andillo. His cresting waves and leaping dolphins were so lifelike I could taste the salt flavor of the sea. Muscular celebrants wearing sandals and gold bangles while feasting on heaped platters of grapes, apricots, and oranges were classic images of Mercediaran culture.
I committed every detail of the capacious chamber to memory. The silk hangings of sunset orange-red. Gilt-trimmed urns filled with dried flowers. Perfume flasks and cloisonné jars, ivory combs and bronze hand mirrors laid out on a lacquered dressing table. A couch laid with pillows and silk sheets, as if the lady might step out of her white coffin and take a nap.
A sad life, ended too early. I wished her peace.
Life-sized bronze images of Gione the Mother and Manadi the Huntress occupied two corners. In the third corner, a curved niche lined with gold mosaic surrounded a plinth that lacked a statue …
Goddess mother! On the marble surface lay a fresh rose. A thin-bladed knife. And indeed a drop of blood. Quite fresh.
“We need to leave.” I pointed at the blood droplet. “Someone was here not so long ago.”
The sight brought back all my misgivings about exquisite murders.
A backward glance as we hurried away revealed wreaths of sea lavender encircling the bases of the four gold pillars. A row of finger-high brass natalés stood guard around the base of the marble catafalque. The mystery of their meaning teased at me as I followed my companions back through the storage rooms and the passage beyond.
